The Produce Graveyard
Why your fridge is full of dying produce... and a dive into grocery psychology
Pull the drawer.
The spinach is slime. The jalapeños are still hard + bright red... a week past when you swore you’d use them. The berries are moldy. You looked at them wrong.
Behind that drawer there’s another drawer. The fancy stuff. The fennel from the farmers market. The fresh dill for the soup you never got to. A lemon you forgot. Half a bunch of cilantro turning to liquid in a plastic bag.
You bought all of this. With money. Last Sunday.
So who is the person who filled this cart and purchased this all?
Because she isn’t me.
Not Tuesday me. Tuesday me has work and a kid who only eats snacks and a 6pm “do I really want to do this” feeling that hits the second I walk in the door. Tuesday me orders pizza. Tuesday me eats cereal standing up.
But Sunday me filled the cart for somebody. And it wasn’t her.
She’s the woman the algorithm rewards. Girlboss. Tradwife. Wellness mom. Hot girl with a green smoothie. The names rotate. The mandate doesn’t. Be optimized. Be aesthetic. Be productive. Be visible. The grocery cart is one of the places she still lives.
She meal-preps. She crushes the inbox. She goes to spin. She posts the bowl. The boss-babe-burnout version of being a person where if you’re not producing, you’re failing... and the produce is part of the production.
She’s the one filling the cart. For a household of twelve we don’t have. For seven dinners I’m not going to cook. For a week where I’m going to be the woman in the wellness reel, except instead of wellness it’s a kind of frantic optimism that hits on Sundays and dies soon after.
The soggy cucumber is the receipt.
I bit off more than I could chew… from a self-image I didn’t sign up for and can’t quite stop renewing.
Here’s what’s strange. I know I can do this differently. There’s a version of grocery shopping I love. And it isn’t this one.
